Thursday May 7 - We met friends from Oregon for breakfast in the morning at a pancake restaurant in the center of Amsterdam, The Pancake Bakery. This restaurant had very interesting faire. Most of it was pancakes, but they had 60 kinds. Greek pancake had feta and lamb, Italian with mozzarella and tomatoes and spices…, it looked similar to a pizza menu. There were some that were sweet with cherries and whipped cream ice cream and sugared fruits, like I said 60 different varieties

At that point were in Nine Streets, a trendy area with nine streets with special shops and restaurants. Wayne’s friend Mark and his wife Cynthia were into geotracking. We tagged along for a while. You use a small but accurate portable GPS system to find objects people hid. He found the location but the object was elusive. Cynthia said it is a way to use our nation’s multimillion dollar system to find Tupperware.

We were close to the Amsterdam Museum, and remembered Geoff had mentioned this as being interesting. My goodness, it went on forever. It had some interactive exhibits, a lot of short films and a history of Amsterdam from 1,000 years ago! We spent hours here.

Next I wanted to find the Albert Cuypstraat market and try my fresh stroopwafel. We took the tram #24 or #16 I don’t remember. Got off at Heineken Experience, walked a block behind it as it said but could not find it! We kept walking no luck. I was determined so we walked down the street toward #4 tram where I had seen it days before. We walked up a few blocks and there it was. Blocks and Blocks of stalls! We found the stroopwafel, and got it half dipped in chocolate. I’m glad we’d had the more stale ones in the store so I knew what to expect. It was much better fresh, but I would not make a trip back to have one.

That adventure out of the way (we were realizing our days were numbered and we still had a lot of things to do and places to see on our list) we chose to go to the Eye Museum for lunch. We hopped a tram back to Centraal Station, walked through the station to the back side and got on a free ferry to the Eye. This was very easy to do. We waited for a ferry for 3 minutes, a 3minute ride across the canal and a brief walk to the Eye. The food was very good. I had salmon open face sandwich and wine. Wayne had wine and some type of vegetable sandwich. We enjoyed the view for a long time and decided to see the free part of the museum. It is a film museum and we didn’t want to spend a lot of time indoors, it had turned into a beautiful day. The museum had many interactive exhibits, but after a glass of wine and setting in the sunshine, we just couldn’t get into it. I did have some fun with the green screen exhibit. We have a video of that!

We strolled around past the front of the train station to the NEMO building. The inside is like OMSI, the outside looks like a sinking ship. The back side is an entry to the traffic tunnel under the canal and on top is a terraced area for sitting outside. A well designed space.

We decided to tram hop again and took #26 to the end of the line to IJ College. There is a lot of new apartments being developed in this area. At the end of the line we stopped at a grocery to get croissants for breakfast and something for dinner, but they had no croissants left! We hopped back on the tram and rode #26 back to Centraal Station. We decided to take #5 up to Museumplein, where we knew there was a bigger grocery store we had been to before. We were able to buy the croissants and dinner there and take #3 back home. Success and our tummies were happy!